KATAGORY V founder and sole original member, bassist/songwriter Dustin Mitchell, has issued the following overview of the band's first show with its brand new line-up (on January 9th) and first gig in over a year

"First of all, let me start off by giving a huge thanks to Rob, the guys in THE STREET and staff at Club Abyss for inviting Katagory V to perform with THE IRON MAIDENS and letting us put on our first show in over a year this past Saturday. The professionalism, hospitality, and overall family feel of everyone involved was above and beyond any show I've ever played in the last decade. Seriously! It was one of the smoothest, tightly run gigs I've had the pleasure to be involved with in memory, and a huge kudos goes out to everyone that was involved.

The show was sold-out to capacity, and there were people having to wait outside just to get in… it was insane! Granted, 90% of the people in attendance were there for the lovely Iron Maidens and the local reigning kings of rock, The Street, who were ON FIRE that night, but what really impressed me was how many showed up early enough to catch our set, many whom I have never seen before at any previous Katagory V shows in our hometown - to sum it up, a LOT of new faces! We even started 10 minutes early, and I believe most of the crowd was a bit surprised and maybe even a little confused by us, but they seemed to warm up to our music half way through our set, as they then began to file onto the floor and up to the front of the stage rather quickly as we got moving.

My nerves were shot by the time we got ready to play, I hadn't slept in over five days, only had 4 hours of sleep and was up early to clean up the house for my daughters birthday brunch, and had the worst butterflies in by stomach. I haven't had this feeling since the band played it's first gig over a decade ago. With an all new line up, only four rehearsals spread out over the two months, and band members living far away, I knew that the expectations would be high, and that the 10% of people that showed up just to see us (including former band members) would be watching and listening with a scrutinizing stance. Would we do justice to the old material? Would we redeem ourselves with the new songs? …or would we simply crash and burn?

The show ALMOST went without any hiccups, but we ended up laying several eggs on stage anyway. The first four songs were hampered by a minor pedal malfunction on Bizzaro's backline drum setup, causing us to play two songs at a much slower tempo and having a very annoying and inconsistent hi-hat making noise through half the set. I'm not sure what the actual cause was as both drummer and pedal worked fine separately, and were fine before the show during sound check, but things started to fall apart by our 3rd song, and we had to stop for a few minutes to change the pedals out after the 4th song. Once we had that minor issue handled and out of the way, we took off like a rocket and only had a few minor sour notes from myself on the bass and backing vocals, a few timing issues on the guitars, and Al singing an extra chorus over Kris's solo section in one of the songs, which in retrospect, sounded pretty cool, and less like a mistake. Being that nearly the entire crowd in attendance had never heard our music before, they may not have noticed many of the huge bombs we dropped, however the musicians in the audience probably heard a few rotten eggs hit the stage, but for the most part, I feel we pull it off rather well with all circumstances considered… and that's why they call it LIVE!!!

Overall, everyone in the band did a tremendous job and gave it there all with a 110% , and regardless of any technical issues, still had a lot of fun performing the songs and delivering the goods. Now with this show out of the way, and all the kinks worked out, we'll do one or two more shows before we start recording the new album at the end of March/beginning of April.

Thanks to everyone that came out to see us, and a very huge thanks to all those that came up to one of us and thanked us personally for our performance and picked up some swag and autographs. It was a great night and I hope we can do it again very soon!"

Cheers!

Dustin